THE US REPORT

T. Boone Pickens was interviewed by 60 Minutes, and when I visited the website to watch that video, another caught my eye. The video dated Oct. 22, 2000 featured an interview with Richard Clarke, President Bill Clinton’s national coordinator for counterterrorism. Watch the video and you’ll begin to see exactly how vulnerable we were. And part of the problem was media’s resistance to understanding exactly what we were facing. Clinton’s Lewinsky situation was media’s obsession at the time. Note the incredulous sometimes skeptical look on the interviewer’s face about some of the warnings Clarke mentioned. There's a big difference in approaches. And the murder of a 13-year-old girl reported by Amnesty International has much in common with our own vulnerability.

The video illustrates the sharp contrast between a Democratic attitude towards terrorism and the Bush administration approach.

I’ve often argued with people about focusing on Israel in the Middle East without considering the many other countries and factions that impact politics and culture in that region. There’s an article in Commentary magazine you should read. It’s an astoundingly balanced analysis of what the new U.S. president will face. The whole November issue of that magazine is a must-read for anyone interested in politics. I get the print edition, but you can see some of the content at the website.

With the obsession on our economy, we must remember we are at war with powerful factions in other countries whose goal is to see the U.S. fail, with a larger goal of seeing Western civilization fail. It’s a war we are mostly fighting and financing on our own.

In looking at these materials I realized something no media has ever mentioned. Bush inherited a mess when he took office, and it was a mess he didn’t create. And you can see by the terrorist incidents listed, our image obviously has suffered for quite a long time. We should remind former presidents and candidates when they speak abroad, they would do well to mind their words and refrain from placing politics above country. Media might, on occasion, do the same. There are plenty of stories in other countries we never hear about—the stoning of a 13-year-old girl who had been raped, for instance, in Somalia.

Amnesty International reported Oct. 31 a murder in Somalia, “Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was killed on Monday, 27 October, by a group of 50 men who stoned her to death in a stadium in the southern port of Kismayu, in front of around 1,000 spectators.” AI also said, “She was accused of adultery in breach of Islamic law but, her father and other sources told Amnesty International that she had in fact been raped by three men, and had attempted to report this rape to the al-Shabab militia who control Kismayo, and it was this act that resulted in her being accused of adultery and detained. None of men she accused of rape were arrested.”

Has media abandoned an obligation to bring us news from other countries, news that is as harshly critical as the news we read at home? And most important, after watching the video, ask yourself whether terrorists who represent nothing more than ideology, who do not stand officially for a country, should be prosecuted by our judges, or by our military. Those men who killed a child after she was raped are the same men who'd like to do the same thing to you and me .

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